Archive for category: Professional Development

According to an article in Management Today although businesses claim to have broadened their CEO selection pool, a staggering 83% of HR directors never get promoted to the role of CEO, reveal Sharon Mullen and Jo Sellwood-Taylor of research firm Mullwood Partnership. Here’s a staggering statistic. Despite two-thirds of HR directors harbouring ambitions to become chief executive, only a fraction work for companies where the HR director has ever been awarded the top job. The question is: why? Story You Read more […]

In previous posts I’ve taken you to a slightly lighter but equally stimulating place and explored the application of proverbs for today’s Learning and Development professionals. I’ve already covered six examples and here are another three for you to enjoy. In this post I’ll explore the following proverbs (starting at number ten, because you’ve already had numbers one through nine): 10. One man’s meat is another man’s poison 11. He who pays the piper calls the tune 12. Actions Read more […]

Learning and Development professionals come from a wide variety of backgrounds – teaching, certainly, but also from the humanities – and a number become involved in L&D just because of their love of the subject area. But I’ve been wondering though if engineers could be the best model for future L&D professionals? Story For the past seven years I’ve worked very closely with the civil nuclear industry in the UK. This industry contains engineers from every discipline: nuclear – Read more […]

Personal information management is becoming a real issue! According to an article I read recently , it’s been estimated that during 2013 approximately 507 billion – yes, BILLION – email messages will be sent each day. That’s one email every 0.00000035 seconds! Add that to the wave of tweets, Facebook updates, blogs and so on and there’s a real chance that we could all be drowning in a sea of information overload – unless, that is, we decide to do something about it. Story According Read more […]

According to an editorial in Management Today (February 2013), the way to paint a positive future for your teams and staff is to tell a story. Far from being something that only children enjoy, storytelling for executives is now de rigor in the workplace. But what is storytelling – and, more importantly, does it work? Story Storytelling has been used by the human race for as long as we have been able to communicate. Australian cave paintings were used by the aboriginal people as a way Read more […]

According to claims in Management Today, 28% of managers and 31% of non-managers have little or no trust in their leader or management team. In addition, research by the CIPD suggests that: “Trust is known to be a fundamental enabler of many workplace benefits. If trust levels are high, organisations experience more, and superior, problem-solving and co-operation, a reduced need for constant monitoring and quality checks and increased information sharing. There is also greater acceptance of Read more […]

I’ve been fascinated by the concept of social learning for some time now; well, when I say fascinated I mean I’ve watched with interest as the number of times this issue has been mentioned at conferences, on Twitter, in blogs and industry forums has steadily increased. I have been enthralled by the rapid adoption of this term by the learning and development community and also somewhat amazed at some of the claims that people are making for social learning. And yet despite this I found myself Read more […]

Today, 7th February 2013 would have been the 201st birthday of Charles Dickens. In one of his most famous books Oliver Twist famously asked “Please sir, may I have some more?” This statement got me thinking; we all want more – we want more people, more budget, more capital investment, more time, more EVERYTHING. That’s understandable – but do we do enough to justify our demands? Story The concept of wanting more is well-known to all of us. Perhaps it’s a symptom of our culture Read more […]

Do you have a licence to practice, I mean really have one? Changes in the way that financial advisors are allowed to carry on their business have now come into play in the UK and this got me thinking. A financial advisor handles your money and for that reason they are expected to be qualified to a defined standard, regulated and supervised. But it’s not the same for all professionals. We always hear how “people are our greatest assets” yet we all know that in reality this holds Read more […]

It’s that time of year again! All of the “great and good” are out in force publishing their predictions for what they think could or will happen in 2013 in the world of training, talent, HR, learning and development, e-learning and so on. I’ve decided – as is my style – to go in a totally different direction and suggest what you should be doing in 2013! I’ve decided that instead of saying what “may happen” I’ll focus on what should be done. After all, there are already Read more […]